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TudorandClaude Opus 5 eddf74745f feat(home): swap in the higher-fidelity hero artwork
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Same 16:9 frame, but not a drop-in replacement — the composition, palette and
copy area all moved, and each one drives a change here.

COPY AREA

The old artwork was a flat #FDF9F3 down its whole left side. This one runs
peach #FEE8D2 at the top to cream #FDF3E7 around 43% height, and below ~48%
the left edge is foliage rather than cream at all. --hero-ground is resampled
to #FEF2E1, the middle of the pale run where the headline and search actually
sit; the scrim covers the foliage further down.

Measured on rendered pixels with the text hidden, sampling the real glyph runs
(via Range, not the element boxes) plus a 120px growth margin:

           title      body      byline
  light    13.61:1    5.74:1    6.66:1
  dark      9.49:1    5.45:1    8.35:1

Body drops from 6.52:1 to 5.74:1 as the foliage comes closer, still clear.

BAND CROP

The schoolhouse moved to ~82% across the frame, leaving only ~140px of artwork
to its right, so the band crop is anchored to the right edge and takes 1344px
back — putting the school at 73%, which the build script now derives and
prints rather than leaving it to drift from the CSS.

The crop is also 3.2:1 rather than matching the phone. The band is not one
ratio: it runs 2.4:1 on a phone to about 3.8:1 under the one-column
breakpoint. Cropping at the narrow end means the wide end throws away height,
which cut the flag off the roof and the base off the building. Sitting above
the middle costs a little width on phones — where the crop's left is hillside —
and keeps the building whole where it matters.

BAND HEIGHTS

Raised to 13rem (861–860px) and 10rem (≤640px). The band was widest-per-height
at exactly 640px, where an 8.5rem band measured 4.2:1 — worse than any wider
viewport, because the height steps down at that breakpoint while the width does
not. Ratios across the range are now 2.0 / 2.6 / 3.6 / 3.1 / 3.8 rather than
spiking. The search still lands at 442px on a 667px viewport.

WEIGHT

Source is 3.1MB; a browser fetches one file — 29–59kB on desktop, 10–14kB on a
phone. Widths re-cut for the larger master: 2000/1400/1000 wide, 1344/900/600
band.

Verified: 0 AA failures across both themes at 1440 / 860 / 390, every srcset
entry present on disk with no orphans, tsc clean, 159/159, build green.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-15 09:22:37 +01:00
TudorandClaude Opus 5 043506cb6b fix(home): art-direct the hero's fallback path, and declare sharp
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Two findings from review on #93, both verified before fixing.

<img src> cannot vary by viewport, so it was always the wide desktop crop. A
browser taking neither AVIF nor WebP therefore fell through to the desktop
frame on a phone and lost the schoolhouse — the exact failure the two-crop
<picture> exists to prevent, surviving in the one path nobody looks at. The
band JPEG the build script already emitted was never referenced, which was the
tell. It now backs a <source media> placed after the modern formats, so they
still win wherever they are supported.

Verified by stripping the AVIF and WebP <source>s at runtime and letting
<picture> re-resolve, which is what an old browser actually sees:

  phone    hero-band-500.avif  →  hero-band-700.jpg   (band crop, school kept)
  desktop  hero-wide-1672.avif →  hero-wide-1200.jpg

sharp was not declared: it arrives transitively from next@16.1.6, so the
documented regeneration command works today and breaks on a Next upgrade or a
clean install that resolves differently. Declared in devDependencies for the
same reason next.config.js already declares its traced font files rather than
trusting the tracer to keep finding them.

The third finding — that the hero's licence is marked unconfirmed in
CREDITS.md while the artwork ships — is accurate and deliberate. It is the
owner's to answer; recording it as unknown is the point of the file.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-14 22:07:01 +01:00
TudorandClaude Opus 5 3f0e05cc99 feat(home): use the supplied hero artwork instead of a drawn one
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Replaces the hand-drawn SVG landscape with the illustration supplied by the
project owner. Master is assets/hero-source.png; everything under
public/brand/hero-* comes from scripts/build-hero-images.js and should never be
hand-edited.

LAYOUT

The artwork is composed as a full-bleed hero: it reserves an empty cream area
down its left side for the headline. The old hero was a two-column grid with
art in the right 0.88fr, which would have cropped that reserved area off and
shrunk the scene into a thumbnail — the one thing the picture is built not to
be. So the panel is now a single layered block: artwork behind, copy on top,
and below the one-column breakpoint the artwork leaves the background and
becomes a band under the search.

Overlaying does not survive down to phone widths — the panel gets too narrow
for the copy to stay inside the cream, so the scrim would have to cover nearly
the whole image and you would be left with a tinted rectangle. Hence the
switch at 860px rather than a single treatment stretched across every width.

CONTRAST

The copy sits on a gradient of --hero-ground, a new token sampled from the
artwork's own cream (#FDF9F3) rather than from Sand. Sand is eight to thirteen
points darker per channel, which leaves a visible seam straight down the hero.
The scrim exists because the artwork is a fixed image on a fluid panel: past
some width the headline would otherwise land on hillside green.

Measured on rendered pixels, sampling background up to 120px beyond the right
edge of each line, so a longer line still has margin:

  light  title 14.36:1   body 6.52:1
  dark   title 11.01:1   body 6.44:1

The worst light case is hillside green showing through the scrim at 6.52:1.

TWO CROPS

The slot is two shapes: roughly 2.1:1–2.7:1 behind the desktop panel, and
2.6:1–4.9:1 as the band. A single file under object-fit: cover centre-crops,
and at the band's extreme that slices a strip through the scene and loses the
schoolhouse — exactly how the drawn hero failed on phones. <picture> switches
crop, not just resolution: the band file is pre-cropped around the school and
is already near 2.6:1, with the subject at ~65% across so squeezing toward
4.9:1 crops the empty sides instead.

WEIGHT

1.6 MB PNG in, AVIF and WebP out; a browser fetches exactly one file — about
23–33 kB on desktop, 9–18 kB on a phone. The JPEG is only the <img> fallback.
`sizes` describes the real panel box (max-width 1400 minus padding) rather than
100vw, which over-requested a candidate at every width on the LCP element.

DARK THEME

A raster cannot be re-graded token by token the way the drawing was, but it
would reproduce the same failure — a bright illustration is the brightest
object on a near-black page. It is dimmed in CSS to read as dusk, and the
scrim fades it into the dark panel rather than into cream.

TESTS

The two illustration journeys are replaced by three, each covering a failure
that still renders a valid-looking page: the artwork actually loading
(naturalWidth, not src), the crop switching at the breakpoint, a modern format
winning negotiation, and the dark theme dimming it.

public/brand/CREDITS.md records provenance for every asset in that folder. The
hero's licence line is marked unconfirmed — that one needs the owner.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-14 21:36:40 +01:00
TudorandClaude Opus 5 dc22fd2853 fix(home): correct what the landing page claims, and give it one rhythm
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The homepage made four statements that were not true, carried elements that
asked nothing of anyone, and had a hero illustration that broke in both the
places it had to work.

Claims, all verified against the code or the API:

  * "24,000+ schools" (three places) against a real 27,230. The fact box meant
    to show the live figure rendered its own fallback on every request, because
    DataInfoResponse declared a `total_schools` field the API has never sent —
    it sends `unique_schools`. The fetch succeeded; only that field was
    undefined, so nothing threw and nothing failed. The interface, not the
    code, was the thing that was wrong.
  * "Up to three schools side by side" against MAX_SCHOOLS = 5, contradicting a
    card 400px below it that correctly said five.
  * "Class sizes" — data the codebase has never held. That copy line was the
    only hit in a full-repo grep.
  * Invented results and Ofsted grades attributed to two real, named schools
    in the compare preview.

Also one feature, three words: Compare (nav), shortlist (footer), pin (cards).
Settled on Compare everywhere. And <title> was the bare string "Home".

Cut: the trust line (repeated the coverage figure one paragraph after the hero
gave it, behind three decorative dots), the "Start exploring" row (three links
to two destinations already in the nav), the six-row coverage table, and three
of the four countdown cards — which gave the page's largest numeral to dates up
to 245 days away, two of them offer days, which cannot be missed. All four
dates remain, at proportionate weight. Value-prop titles drop from <h2> to <p>;
they were outranking the page's real headings in the document outline.

Rhythm: the gaps between the seven landing bands were 24/32/24/16/48/32/16px,
each band setting its own margin, with four different section-header
treatments between them. The page container now owns one gap, and there is one
header pattern. An e2e test asserts the gaps are identical.

Illustration: it kept a fixed light palette in both themes, which left a pale
sky slab as the brightest object on a near-black page, out-shouting the H1 and
the search box. It now reads from --ill-* tokens with a dark re-grade. And the
hero slot ranges from 1.34:1 to 4.9:1 across breakpoints, which no single
composition survives under `slice` — at 860x176 a 540x520 scene shows only its
bottom 110 units, so the schoolhouse was cropped away entirely on phones,
leaving hills and a pin pointing at nothing. There are now two compositions,
each drawn against the crop window its own breakpoint produces, with CSS
showing one. Both are static server-rendered SVG.

The deadline bar renders on the server rather than on hydrate. The effect-based
version needed a reserved height, and one guessed number cannot cover a block
whose supporting line wraps differently at every width — measured, it was short
at all four, shifting the page up to 108px on a phone.

Verified on the built output through an offline render harness (no local
server): real compiled CSS, real rendered markup, four widths, both themes.
tsc clean, 159/159 unit tests, build green.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-14 17:29:47 +01:00
Tudor accc562b90 feat(brand): adopt the schoolcompare identity across the site
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Implements the supplied brand guideline: the pin-and-leaf mark, the lowercase
schoolcompare wordmark, Manrope for headings and Inter for everything a person
reads a number from, the deep-teal/coral/mustard/sage palette, and the rounder
geometry the guideline asks for.

The landing hero is rebuilt to the concept: a Sand panel carrying the
proposition, the search and a trust line, with the brand landscape bleeding to
the panel's right edge, followed by the four value props.

Concept vs reality — where the guideline describes something this product does
not have, the real feature takes its place and the decision is recorded in a
code comment next to it:

- The Thriving Score is not implemented. Four of its five sub-scores (pastoral,
  enrichment, community, facilities) have no source in DfE or Ofsted data, and
  its band names are Ofsted's own, which would sit beside the real Ofsted grade
  and be indistinguishable from it.
- Guides, About, Favourites and Sign in are not added to the nav — there are no
  such pages and no accounts system. Rankings and Admissions, which the
  guideline omits, keep their places because they exist.
- The fourth value prop is "Never miss a deadline" rather than "Save & revisit",
  which would need shortlisting.

Two deviations from the supplied swatches, both forced by contrast and both
confined to text and fills. Coral #F97360 under a white label measures 2.75:1
against a 4.5 floor, so --action is a darkened #BE3C27 and the original coral
survives as --coral for tints, borders and illustration. Mustard #F2C94C is
1.5:1 as text, so --mustard-ink carries labels while --mustard stays exact for
fills and rings. Every token clears AA on all three light grounds; Sand is the
binding one, so several values sit a step darker than white alone would need.

The guideline is light-only, but the site already ships a dark theme, so it is
rebuilt from the same tokens rather than dropped.

Verified: tsc clean, 159/159 unit tests, production build green, and the
generated share card and app icon render from the new mark. The hero and the
site chrome were rendered from the compiled CSS and the prerendered markup to
confirm Manrope and Inter actually resolve — a font token that silently falls
back has shipped here before.
2026-08-07 18:05:49 +01:00